No prior knowledge is required. However, students are expected to show: interest in communicative practices, perceptiveness, critical thinking, willingness not to take things for granted. Students are expected to actively participate in the course by discussing their own communicative experience in class and to keep up with the assignments.

Target skills and knowledge:

The course aims to enable students to
Learn key concepts in pragmatics;
Become aware of the linguistic resources for intentionally and conventionally conveying meaning;
Understand some of the mechanisms accounting for the encoding and decoding of meaning in text and context;
Identify possible correlations between linguistic expressions and their context of use;
Plausibly account for the theoretical-practical interpretive analysis of contextualized linguistic expressions

Examination methods:

Attenders:
Either 1) a 2-hour-long written test with 12 open-ended questions
Or 2) a term paper reporting in detail the design, realization, findings and implication of a pragmatics project individually carried out by the students, whose topic and goal requires the lecturer’s prior approval

Attending students who choose to write a term paper are expected to discuss their proposed research project with the lecturer during office hours, and to obtain her approval (of its topic, goal and design) at least 2 months before submitting the term paper.

Non-attenders:
a written test with 12 open-ended questions

Assessment criteria:

i) For the term paper (attenders only): motivation, value, design and critical discussion of the findings of the research project and accuracy, thoroughness, precision, register-appropriateness and coherence of its report.
ii) For the written exam: knowledge of the topics covered in class and in the course material; showing understanding of the concepts and methods presented; ability to apply the knowledge acquired to the analysis of texts; ability to recognise and classify the phenomena explained in class and in the course material; ability to argue for, motivate and provide evidence supporting one’s interpretation; ability to think logically, analytically and critically; ability to convey information in line with the maxims of Grice’s Cooperative Principle of Conversation.

Course unit contents:

The course will cover the following topics: deixis; context; inferences; the cooperative principle; politeness; (extended) speech acts; morphopragmatics; conversational structure; variational pragmatics. It will also cover one or more of the following: variational pragmatics; cross-cultural and L2 pragmatics; grammaticalization-lexicalization; developmental pragmatics; pragmatic disorders.

Course material comprises texts and resources made available during the course on the Moodle platform, and lecture notes for attenders. Lecture PPTs and further readings will be uploaded onto the Moodle platform as well.